0063 A boxed CoCo 1 and a fun read-through of a 1983 Radio Shack catalog
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มิ.ย. 2023
- #theshack
On today's SMMC, we have a couple 8-bit computers and an awesome Radio Shack 1983 computer catalog. Let's check out the computers and then check out how expensive things were in 1983!
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The computer shop in my hometown in the 80s actually used a Timex Sinclair 1000 as a door stop.
Power move
😂
Fun fact: A lot of TRS-80 Model 16s ended up as dedicated email servers on the early open Internet due to them being available used for peanuts by that point and just capable enough to host a basic sendmail instance.
Here in Western Australia, our local provider used a Xenix TRS-80 Model 16 as a dial-in host for nearly 10 years.
Good to know that Radio Shack's exorbitant price markups have existed since the beginning of time, ha!
Also, fun fact -- the _corporate_ Radio Shack stores are all gone, but franchise-owned stores (rare, but they _do_ exist) had the option to stick around... the one in my tiny NC town actually is still in operation, and still a Radio Shack.
AND they still have an online presence, including offering electronics classes.
@@gabrielleeliseo6062 Justin Bieber also still has an online presence. I think he has about the same degree of relevance, too...
I could get a 10 percent commission on the 50 % gross margin of a TRS80 in 1983. The Radio Shack company stores came in 3 flavors then; Radio Shack Computer Centers (B to B, Education with training classroom) Radio Shack Plus Computer Dept. and regular "shack"stores. The reason for "Mercedes Silver" 😅 was that we got a good price on a silver monitor for the model 1. From then on, everything was painted silver. That paint was so crappy that the color shifted to cream, which in time sunburned into "cat piss" yellow.😂 I remember that catalog from my outside sales back then. We had about 3000 outside sales reps in the US back then.
The ZX81 was my first computer, and I loved it. Recently I found a project called "ZX Wespi" which uses an ESP32 installed internally to provide a web server that can store and load games into the '81. If you add the ZX Wespi, an internal 16Kb memory expansion, a new keyboard and a composite video mod then you have... well, frankly you have spent more time and money that you probably should have, but it's so cool to see the ZX81 running again.
It's interesting reading about the TRS-80, because this sort of expense was exactly *why* Sir Clive decided what the world (or at least the UK) needed was a cheap home micro that would give you some useful computing power but under £100... hence things like the ZX81 :)
The ZX81 was powerful enough to run a nuclear power station, according to Sir Clive, anyway...
@@EnglishMike As long as the RAM pack did not wobble I expect it could.
He was actually right, unfortunately. There was a price at which these would sell and Sir Clive achieved that. So many things could have been a lot better had he been able to sell them for more.
We weren't a particularly well-to-do family when I was growing up, but looking back on my childhood, my dad apparently dropped some serious coin on computing equipment!
From memory, we had a ZX-81, TRS-80 Model 3 (16K cassette only), Commodore 64 (with disk drive, printer, and a Montgomery Ward TV/monitor), and then a 386DX/40 w/ 4MB RAM, 1024x768 NI monitor, and an Okidata OL-400 laser printer. I used them all and learned a bit of BASIC programming beginning with the TRS-80.
It's just insane to think about how much this stuff actually cost. Knowing how -cheap- err.. _frugal_ my mom was, I can't imagine how he got away with buying all of that. Not to even mention software. A dozen or so C64 carts? GEOS? WordPerfect 5.1?
I always laugh when I see this quote: "My biggest fear is that, after I die, my wife will sell all my things for the price I said I paid for them."
My Dad bought a lot of Tandy and other computer stuff too, some of it new and early so it was definitely expensive. He could fix a lot of things around the house to save money, however. He had the Model 100 laptop, and I remember Mum mentioning she was kinda peeved at how much it cost.
Don't knock the ZX81... it allowed me and my older brother to have a computer; without it my life would have been very different. Forever thankful to Sinclair for making it affordable and allowing those of us in the shitty end of a city to pool something together to get a computer in the Christmas of 1982, having scored an old B&W portable from someone in the pub.
I do not mind people knocking it. It was educational in that you could learn about computers including BASIC but otherwise was compromised in just about every way imaginable. With the wobbly 16K RAM pack you could write quite large programs however. The US version had 2K of RAM by the way.
In the larger markets, Radio Shack had exclusive Computer Centers, and they had moderate success. It catered mainly to small to mid-size businesses. Larger companies elected to go with mainstream IBM systems.
When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 1990's, they had gotten away from dedicated computer store model, opting to go with normal Radio Shack stores to sell a variety of computer systems. In their day, Radio Shack had group of sales & maintenance staff, to service the business accounts, separate from the consumer-level stores. Unfortuantely, High Pricing, & their inability to 'break the ice' with the larger commercial customers, ultimately led to the end of the exclusive computer business.
@@SimonEllwood The UK spec was fitted with 1kB of RAM; there was actually a playable chess game that ran in that 1k!
@@cambridgemart2075 I wrote a program to drive a Maplin Speech Synth add-on in 1K back in the day!
I had the computer, my brother had the tv, we had the ram pack between us. We weren’t poor but my parents were tight. I actually understand why that’s right these days. I make my kids do chores for any money. But yes , changed my future too quite possibly.
Back in the 80s, you could use a particular shade of auto touch-up paint to fix your CoCo: Mercedes silver. That exact shade from that era is probably no longer available, but at the time that shade was recognized enough that '80 Micro' (a TRS-80 computer magazine) had a regular column featuring a character called... Mercedes Silver.
It's simply awesome when you review old printed media. Loved it!
agreed
That decollator at 28:00 just separates the layers on multi-copy paper. So lets say you had paper that printed on two layers at the same time, you would use that to separate a long printout into two separate stacks. The one in the catalog was a manual version, but there were ones that were motor-driven. There was another machine (I don't know if Radio Shack had one, though) called a "burster", which would separate the pages and could remove the tractor feed edges.
Ah the "Burster" at my first IT job, took about 8 hours of fine tuning over several monthly statement runs to get it to perfectly rip and split the fan fold paper. Once setup, it did not move for 2 years incase it changed shape and had to be adjusted again
This video made me realize what I miss about the 80s and 90s - the plethora of options you had to customize your system in terms of capability. These days, yeah, there are processor and RAM options, but you can buy all kinds of off-the-shelf systems that will all do the same basic things. Back in these days, you had to pick and choose, and it really meant something to buy, say, a modem. That gave you a capability to do something not everyone could do, unlike today. Thanks Adrian and keep up the great work!
Add to that the competing architectures and complete lack of real user testimonials outside your friends, and you get the bad old days of computing purchases. The 80s really was the wild west of home computers. I am not claiming that the lack of options we have today is good, but it is better from a customer perspective and customer experience.
The late '70s and the '80s were what I call the Golden Age of computing. This was the first time non-engineers had a chance to have a computer at home that was useful (I am excluding calculators and machines like IMSAI and Altair).
These microcomputers, as they were then known, were all different and mostly incompatible. You chose your computer, and you were committed to the platform. Your software was whatever was available for it, or whatever you wrote yourself.
Getting to know each machine and its capabilities was very interesting and exciting to me. Between me, my friends and school, there were about half a dozen different platforms.
Here you had, for the first time, machines available to the public that would do whatever you told them to do, the first mass-market general-purpose computers. One person could fully understand the hardware and software. It was a unique moment in history. There was a sense that such technology had the potential to radically change society, but how that might happen was not figured out yet.
Today computers are infinitely more powerful, but far less interesting. They've been abstracted into generic appliances with no character. While that is the very reason for the triumph of the PC architecture, I will never forget the competing manufacturers all jostling for a slice of market share. It really was a silicon Wild West.
Adrian’s teeshirt says ‘Forgotten Machines’ which seems very appropriate when unboxing a CoCo which he couldn’t remember receiving 😊
My hardware lecturer at college used to say the 6809 was the best microprocessor to work with & program (for embedded, at least), although at the time (mid ‘80s) the 68k machines were just starting to appear. Later, when I started work, a friend of mine used to how great his Dragon 32 was, but 6809 systems basically passed me by. Apart from the CoCo and Dragon, the 6809 was too late to the party for the home computer revolution, but maybe I’ll do some digging to find out how good it really was 😊
I really enjoy the vintage catalog tours - totally reliving my youth with those!
Those Tandy boxes bring back memories. I had five or six of them as a kid. I stored Legos and other toys in them. Dad worked for Tandy in mid 80s to around 92.
It's really fun to look at old catalogs for those of us with perspective - an 8MB drive from back then was large, but would only hold (at best) ONE MP3 song today!
Bear in mind, in 1983, the IBM PC was only 3 years old, and the PC world was just starting to build computers with 286s. Early PC architecture was pretty crappy too until x86 came along, and Tandy was pretty far ahead of the pack (including IBM) at that moment in time. Like you said, it ran a Unix variant, and with the Z80 as a support processor, it was a pretty powerful system at the time. Yes, they weren't exactly selling like hotcakes, but they did sell when the job required that level of compute power. I worked at a Tandy Computer Center at the time, and it was fun to have such a beast of a machine. That was also the end of the line for Tandy based computers. Everything after that was PC compatible stuff, and Tandy eyed the home/small business market, and never created high end PCs.
Still have a sapphire Tandy lapel pin.
Thanks for the awesome trip down amnesia lane. I built and used a Sinclair ZX-81 in 1981. Huge pain, but it made me appreciate the VIC-20 I got in 1982.
I was lucky enough to be able to save up for a BBC Micro Model B in 1981. Took months to arrive, though!
My junior high school had about 15 Model IIIs in the computer lab and we had that network connector. The "master" computer had disk drives, the other computers did not. The teacher could send a program down from a floppy for us to start working with. They were all like 5K BASIC programs, so it didn't take all that long. Also, we could - from the client computers - print things out using the printer connected to the master computer. I think it went through the RS-232 interface. It did not connect via the cassette port as we all had cassette recorders at the desks to save our changes to programs we had to write for class (if we didn't finish during the class time).
Hi Adrian! Just a reminder that the Lisa also came out in 1983 and was also $10k. Imagine spending $10k on a Model 16 vs a Lisa???
Lisa certainly seemed way more cutting edge! Although on the other hand $10k on the Lisa likely didn't come with the hard drive? And no multiuser. It's just amazing how much power you can get now for so little money!
The Model 16 had some pretty significant multi-user office solutions, including Multiplan. In the very 1990s we still had a real-estate company client running on Model 16s and terminals across three office sites. Worked well.
The Model 16 would have been the better choice, unless you wanted to write Mac software. Any software development effort invested into (xenix on) the model 16 would be easily portable to any future unix system. The Lisa was a dead end
I really miss Radio Shack. It'd be so cool if it could come back, supplying parts for makers of all types.
Unfortunately, local "brick and mortar" electronics parts stores are completely disappearing now. The very last one I know of in my area is closing down next month. Everyone is so anti-social now and just wants to do EVERYTHING online. I hate it.
I looked up a "decollator" and it looks like it's for when you feed multiple sets of paper with carbon paper in-between into the printer. The decollator separates it into individual stacks of paper and discards the carbon paper.
I was there for VCF east! I didn't want to interrupt you, but you actually spotted me hauling off a TRS-80 and said hey. Thanks for all the great videos, we got it working in no small part thanks to those. I'm just a little late watching this video, hehe. PS my first real job in the 2000s was at a RadioShack, loved that place as a kid, sad to see it go.
Adrian, in my high school, we had 12 of the mod 3 computers attached serially to a single trs-80 mod 3 with dual floppy drives. All ran via that serial cable back to the extended board that sat next to the 'mother' computer. All drives were single sided 5.4" floppies and all could be accessed at the same time. Thanks for the excellent content as per usual!
I remember toward the end of the CoCo era, a program was published which allowed you to turn the 64K CoCo into a serial printer buffer. It used bank switching to "turn off" the ROMs and place itself right at the bottom of RAM so that it could use most of the 64K as the buffer. But if I remember correctly, it could only either receive or transmit so you had to first fill the buffer with the complete print job and then switch it to transmit to dump the buffer to the printer.
The whole idea was to deal with slow printers, but that's no longer a problem and serial printers have pretty much gone the way of the dodo.
I think there were some late Model III’s with the white paint.
Yeah, I sold a system like that in Virginia Beach to a high school for $35K.
I'm pretty sure you could buy the furniture that's in that catalog too.
I wonder if all those office photos were taken at Tandy Towers.
A Coco 1 -- awesome.
My first machine was a Coco2, so no worries about paint fade or anything (the "colour" was throughout the the foam plastic). A friend's dad repainted the family with Coco1 with a textured plastic-paint and made it indestructible--that thing lasted for years.
The ZX81 was an amazing machine, the ultimate in minimalism. It did so much with just 4 chips. Yes the keyboard was poor, but the keyword entry method made it less painful. Yes the 16K module was dicey but there were alternatives. I built my 81 from a Sinclair kit in 1982, before Timex sold them, and later expanded it to 16K internal SRAM. Great fun!
I had the model two back in the early 80s and when the 68000 expansion board came out, I added that to it and ran Xenix.
I used it to develop software for local businesses. While expensive, it also meant my clients that were using them had a little money to spend on software development so it all worked out.
Yes companies had model 2s. Radio Shack's computer centers were slick, held classes and small businesses loved them. Located often in a downtown they were seen as a legitimate player in a time where there were no small business systems.
In an era where companies relied on service bureaus to process general ledgers and payrolls you could easily save money even at these prices and in the end do no more work than you had to do in prep for the service bureau.
They were quite successful till the IBM XT came on the seen. At that point Tandy in attempt to regain the business market introduced the Tandy 2000, with I believe a 186 processor, but it never caught on. After that failure the company began closing the computer centers and focused on the 1000 as a low budget alternative for home use.
By the way the small devices on the cover were not calculators but handheld computers. The Tandy 100 which was larger had a several line screen actually caught on with reporters for a while and the most interesting use I have saw took place in a deli, which everyone knew was a hang out for bookies. What Deli had 8 pay phones. One day I was there for lunch because it was a great NY style Jewish Deli near Pimlico Racetrack and I went back to the bathroom near where the phones were. On one of the phones was a one of the bookies with his Tandy 100 hooked up through an acusticoupler and the hand set from the next phone on his ear. I'm not sure what he connected to but it was the era of Compuserve and bulletin boards so maybe he got his race results.
I had a Coco 1! I got it new (I’m 57). I since donated it five years ago to a computer museum. I now wish I would’ve kept it. I had the box and manuals. Everything. Fully functional! What a great video!
Your donation made it possible for others to experience the enjoyment and edification that came with your CoCo. Thank you for donating, and for sharing from your life to others.
kinda glad you sent it to a museum instead, wouldve collected dust but is probably on display now for hundreds to see and appreciate :3
Relax, it's only a Trash-80.
I got one of those a while back. I wrote a machine code program which interfaced with a running BASIC program to allow the program to put text directly onto the high resolution graphics screen. It could be loaded to any available place in RAM and would run from there since it used PCR (Program Counter Relative) instructions for all internal calls and references. I would use the CLEAR command to reserve 6 "pages" of video RAM since the high-res screen needed 4 pages. The other 2 pages would be used by my program.
Printing to the high-res screen became a simple matter of setting up a USR call and then calling it with something like:
X=USR0(CHR$(26)+"Hello, world!")
The CHR$(26) would clear the graphics screen followed by printing the text starting at the top left corner.
That was just the start of what the program could do. It could re-define characters, repeat characters and a lot more.
This was a real trip down memory lane! Back in the early 1980s I had a little side business going doing upgrades for the Mod III and other RS computers (along with Atari and Commodore). RS charged utterly ridiculous amounts of money for upgrading their stuff. I did the 48K RAM upgrades on the Mod III for about 1/4 of what RS charged people and still made a profit. Ironically I sourced the RAM chips from, of course, RS itself. You could literally buy the chips off the wall at the local RS in blister packs for a quarter of what RS was charging for the "upgrade".
I have a couple of Mod III (One is used as my footrest under my work bench), a Mod II, a Model 6000 (the big Xenix machine with a built in HD) , monster sized HD you saw in the catalog and a few other old Tandy items floating around. Keep telling myself I need to dig them out and see if I can get 'em working. I ran the Color Computer III for quite a while using the OSX operating system instead of TRS-DOS. The Coco III was actually more power powerful than most of Radio Shack's "business systems".
39:50 This is exactly what we used in our TRS-80 computer room in my high school c. 1985!
it allowed us to have a bunch of machines without floppy drives and load remotely from one that did.
Radio Shack's prices were a major obstacle for me back in 1978. The first computer I ever got my hands on was a TRS 80 Model I, freshly out of the box at a local store and left turned on when the employees went to lunch. I had to have one, but at my weekly 'income' of exactly 5$ that was not easy. My parents thought I had gone crazy, but I got my computer. Not that TRS 80, I had to build it myself from a kit and spent a few years expanding that simple thing. Thank god that I did not get a shiny new computer back then. I learned far more from that simple thing than I ever could have from that TRS 80. I still have it and it still works.
Radio Shack had 4 versions of the Network Controller. Versions 1 & 2 used the cassette port to interconnect up to 16 systems. Version 3 used RS-232 to interconnect up to 16 systems. Version 4 used twisted pair wiring, ran at 1Mbs and could connect up to 64 systems. Besides the Model 3 & 4, version 4 cards were available for the Tandy 1000 PC line. Version 4 was based upon Corvus Omninet which was an early cross platform lan system which briefly saw some success during the early to mid 80s due to a much lower cost than ethernet systems of the time.
Probably why they continued to sell the V2. People who didn't have an RS-232 card could still network computers. That and the V3 only worked on the Model III and the Model 4 (in III mode).
I seem to remember some kind of network board that Tandy sold that had screw terminals on the back to connect the wires.
@27:23 looks like a gestetner or a banda graph. I bet it smells wonderful too, and only copies in blue.
The first HDD I ever bought was a Maxtor 8.6GB for $150 and my Epson 800 was $200 and 64MB of SIMM RAM for $150 in the late 90's. I was born in 1986 and was never exposed to any of the Radioshack computers. I do remember computers being super expensive. The computer I bought that 8.6GB HDD for was an Epson and was given to me by my aunt who got it from her boss as they upgraded it to Windows 95 and it was BSOD city. That PC got me into building PCs.
Remember when 4.1 GB seemed like a huge amount of storage space? Back then, disks had just started to measure in MB and GB, and people would say ‘You will never fill that drive!’ But now, the whole operating system, all your files, documents, internet videos, etc. take up much more space. I wouldn’t even bother with a USB flash drive of that size. What could I possibly use it for?
The paint on the original CoCo was the same as used on the original TRS-80 (aka the Model I). I learned the hard way that having insect repellent on my hands while handling my Model I caused the paint to literally melt, looking like the damage on the top of the one shown here.
Also, the business machines were generally not stocked/shown at the retail stores. They were at the Computer Centers.
As for pricing, in this era, the saying was that the computer you wanted cost $5000. That included most XT clones, so the prices then were really not that extravagant compared to other computers.
Wow, those prices! Is it any wonder the Apple IIe sold so well at $1,395 in 1983? (Or $1,995 bundled with a Disk II floppy drive and controller card, Apple Monitor III, and an Extended 80-Column card.)
It’s crazy to think the other way around: $4,000 today is ~$1,300 in 1983!
The C64 was half that price.
I think I saw my first computer (Apple) in the 4th grade. I knew i had to have one, so I scoured the want ads in the newspaper until I found one. I called the guy up and asked how much. He said 35. I was so excited. That was a lot of money but seemed like I could do it. So, $35, where do you live? No, 35hundred. :( I had to ask my mom what that meant :(( Needless to say, it took a couple more years to make that much.
But the Apple did not do payroll or accounts receivable. These were business machines that were competing against low end mini computers like DEC.
VCF was definitely a blast, and a blur. Great meeting you there Adrian!
I played a lot of FS on the 1000, incredible! It was tough but fun still at least my 13 year old past self thought so!
Krylon Fusion is pretty awesome for painting plastic. It sort of sinks in. Leaves a really nice finish. Give it a shot.
$5k in 1983 would be $15.3k in 2023. Woof.
Thanks for another great video. Old catalogs are a time warp. I've got a Grainger catalog from the 1950's. Fun to flip through.
You could buy a plot of land in a city for $5k in 1983. Try that with $15.3k now.
@@Okurka. I think everybody knows inflation calculations are bad at tracking larger purchases like land or property. Or even cars. The calculations are based around the price of daily goods, not luxury purchases.
@@kaitlyn__L Luxury purchases like computers in 1983.
@@Okurka. exactly. Computers, hifi equipment, etc don’t track linearly with inflation. Inflation calculations are only a rough guide of buying power. If you really look into it there’s different inflation figures for every single sector, but the government doesn’t have calculators for those.
I remember in the early 80's before the IBM PC, at our local community college, we had the 48K Model III computers with dual 5 ¼ floppy drives and a dot matrix printer, that was in a sound deadening box and cooling fan for our "computer labs" in classrooms and the library. There was a student or librarian "monitor" in the labs to make sure we weren't playing games. That didn't stop us. lol
The Radio Shack catalog was interesting. In 1983 I was still living in England, and often visited the Tandy store in my hometown of Coventry, just to drool. I used to buy components and other hardware from them, but never got around to affording a computer.
By 1983 RS had computer centers. The model 16 would almost never be found at a regular computer store, only at those that hosted computer centers. As expensive as it seemed we (at the time I was working for a very large motorcycle dealership that had 5 locations) opted for a PDP-11/73 (basically a miniaturized version of the 11/70). We had looked at both systems and the RS Model 16 won out on price (by a long shot), however I was going to be the one to set-up and run the system so I favored the PDP-11 because I was more familiar with it's operating system and BASIC language. The RSTS/E OS for the PDP-11 was just far better for running timesharing applications at the time than Xenix was. the PDP-11 was also more expandable. more powerful and far better suited to a true multi-user environment. Anyway, that was the market they were playing in.
The 16 was not sold in your typical Radio Shack retail store where you would usually see the consumer and home business based machines. However at the Tandy Computer Center (I worked at both) you could tour the heavy hitters that TRS had to offer. We were never provided a demo of the 16 however. Had we sold one (I doubt we did) it would have been special ordered direct from Ft. Worth and probably delivered straight to the customers address.
Do you know how many of those Computer Centers they had? I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s and never saw one. (There had to have been at least one there.) I do remember seeing computers at the RS but they were always the consumer ones.
In 1984 my middle school had 14 model IVs and one model III that all streamed data through the Tandy network interface from the teacher's model IV (dual disk drives) at the back of the room. Great memories playing the same limited supply of games during lunch and after school every day. One day the computer teacher left the storage cabinet open and we found a cassette drive with a bunch of CLOAD magazine tapes buried in the back. It took a while to figure out how to get the cassette drive working but once we did we doubled our game collection, very exciting!
I liked seeing that printing terminal in the RS catalog. I used a Dec printing terminal with a Vax 11/750 years ago.
Which model? The DECwriter, II, III, or IV? I think there were the LA-100 and LA-120, for crying out loud I may have manuals for one of those in my (overstuffed) basement.
Printing terminals using green-bar tractor feed paper were the way to go back in the day!
@@bobblum5973 Decwriter II
Joel had a working TRS-80 Network 3 setup going as a demo last year sometime at the Dallas-Ft. Worth Retro Computing meetup. I don't remember how many computers he had attached. Communications was all RS-232 (Serial). It was targeted at schools, the teacher could create lessons and tests and the students could get files, submit files (homework) and take tests. Some of the software had special versions to work with the setup. Joel had some pieces of the specialized software, but is trying to track down the rest. I *think* he was going to demo it at a VCF, but I don't remember.
Yep, my husband found the software on eBay and built a working setup. He has a ton of details on his site but YT doesn't allow those types of comments.
Your uploads are the highlight of my day, thanks Adrian. 👍
In high school I had a friend whose family had Tandys. I have no problem picturing them spending large amounts for Tandy equipment. They knew how to program those machines inside and out.
You could take a couple of magnets from an old defective harddrive, glue on the front of a broom, makes it easy to find screws on a dark carpet 🙂 thanks for the videos, much appreciated 👍
The network interface box, with the nob, used the cassette port. You could send data out to all the PC's and to get stuff back, you would select the Computer and transfer back to the main PC. It's what we had when I was at School.
The decollator! I was a computer operator from 2000 - 2003 but working on stuff much older. We used to print some big jobs that we needed multiple copies of on the carbon paper in the line printer (on continuous forms) - so we'd take the second copy off of the first using the decollator. One stack of paper goes in, two stacks come out. Unless something went wrong (it always went wrong) and then a bunch of bad words would come out, too.
As far as line printers go, 150 isn't that fast for a big line printer - but that machine is a hybrid. The big IBM printers that would've been available in the same era would've been somewhere from 300-1500 lines a minute I think.
Loved the catalog perusal! This channel rocks!
Oh, thats really cool! It has to be rare to find a CoCo with the box.
If you put the case of the Coco in a trash bag with rubbing alcohol for several hours(outside in summer heat will help as well) it will soften the paint to remove it. This is an easy way to prep it for a respray, I did the same process before painting a friends Magnavox Odyssey II which came out pretty decent.
Nice process!
I have to admit I do have some love for the TS1000/ZX81. Modded my TS1000 for composite video, added 16k internal, replaced the keyboard and the 7805 with a Traco (less heat). I also had to replace the RCA jack, as it was damaged.
Yes, it is a SUPER SUPER minimal machine, but I have to admire it for what it is.
And some of the "hires" games are surprisingly good. (Well, for a monochrome no sound minimal system). ;-)
Loved my Timex Sinclair 1000, learned a lot with it, and I still have it. Nice to have NJ represented. I grew up in Wall just a couple miles from where VCF East is held.
NJ sucks.
That is some vintage stuff. It looks like 👍 mid 1980’s. Computers 🖥️ back then were very interesting 🧐. Too bad, Radio 📻 Shack doesn’t exist anymore, they sold so many great 😊 products, and they stood behind, and serviced what they sold. Your friend, Jeff.
If you're going to paint the TRS-80 I would highly recommend Krylon for plastics. It bonds really well and leaves a good finish.
Krylon is terrible for everything else! Source: graffiti writer and otherwise spray paint user
Two excellent machines. I just refurbed both of mine. You can retrobright the CoCo1 keyboard with nothing but sunlight.
I used to be a Radio Shack manager and remember looking at the store's monthly P&L statement which explained why those prices were so high: The basic markup on the TRS 80 was approximately 30-40%. Admittedly, I didn't work at the Shack until the 90s. I would imagine that if anything, the markup would have been way higher. If you think about the overhead required to have all those specialized parts distributed to all those neighborhood stores, you would have to have that kind of profit to pay for it. And it worked... until it didn't.
Got my TRS-80 model 1 L2 basic 16K machine used, for a $500 debt the original owner could not pay. He offered the computer to my dad to repay the debt, and my dad excepted. Those computers were expensive, way back then.
The Coco 1 was my first computer back in '82. Mine was like the one in the catalog with the main badge to the left and the memory badge on top to the right. And it's the black plastic - I was on it almost constantly from the time I got it until fall '85 when I went to college and was required by the school to get a PC (IBM PC Portable in my case). I still have it, in the box, along with a couple of floppy drives, a multipak interface (which I think still needs repair after a science fair project when wrong) and that graphic tablet. Didn't pay nearly that much for the tablet tho. I don't think it was a very big seller and they closed it out just a year or so after your catalog. I think we paid about $100 for it. It was...kinda functional I guess. Mine was off going up the left side as I recall. I don't know what's in the interface pack, but the tablet itself is just a big pcb with a bunch of crossing traces and resistors, plus a couple of pots for calibration. I was able to somewhat correct the weirdness with the pots, but never completely. Always wondered if some of the resistors were out of spec and if replacing them with better, tighter tolerance ones would help. Maybe I should make a video about it...
The catalogs are amazing.
My first computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000, I loved it and it gave me my first taste of using computers. We had the RAM expansion and when the games would load we played Frogger and Chess (a technical feat unmatched to this day).
After the Timex I had an Atari 800xl which i used for years after and upgraded to 128K with a kit I bought at The Floppy Wizard in Houston.
I loved both computers, sadly they are long gone into a landfill somewhere.
Nice you were loaded my first computer was a ZX-81 and my dad and a friend made me a home made memory expansion that I think it was 4k. After that I move to the Commodore camp and got a 128 in 87 or 88
@@MarianoLu my neighbor had a commodore 64 and we would spend our afternoons after school typing in games that were in Compute magazine. Loads of fun.
I still remember being appalled at Radio Shack prices. I once went in to get my free battery (Battery Club), and bought a single floppy disk for SIX BUCKS.
Those free batteries were very leaky.
The Visual V1050 came out in the same era. The price for that system, plus the software bundle, was $2495. The software bundle included WordStar, DR Graph, Microsoft MultiPlan, C-BASIC, and Z80 Assembler. When I had my system, I purchased an Epson RX-80 dot-matrix printer that worked forever and lived through multiple PCs before I gave it away to someone who was still using it until recently to print labels.
39:45 the TRS-80 network! Back in the mid/late 1980s my elementary school had a computer lab for the older students with a TRS-80 network. We had Model I with green monochrome monitors on the student side. I don't know what the rest of the system was. I only know the software for our computers was loaded over a network because the teacher told us. Unfortunately, that's all I know/remember.
In the mid 90s I bought 3 TRS-80 Model 2s, and 4 Tandy 6000 machines from the high school I went to. Also got the 3x8" Drive expansion, a 35 meg external HD (loaded with Xenix) and a massive TRS-80 Line printer. That was what they had LEFT of their old office computer setup. That would have been, in 2023 dollars, well deep into 6 digit money wise. That school district was also notorious for wasting money!
I had a load of fun with my CoCo 1 after it arrived in 1980. Mine had the black textured keyboard surround, yours has the smooth silver surround which is around 1981-2. I do recall a comment in Rainbow magazine that Chrysler silver gray rattle can paint was a close match. Btw, the wear in front of the keyboard tells me it’s a high hours machine
I had the color printer CGP-115 at $249.95 (28:45), it was connected to a 6502 SYM-1 board. It was entertaining to see that printer literally "draw" characters line by line. One of the cheapest printer I could find at that time until I switched to a noisy dot matrix.
Wow, that brings back memories.
I bought my own Model III, must've been late '80 or early '81. Spent my entire income from my paper route to do it, and still could only afford the 4K version initially. I did manage to scrap the funds together for the upgrade to 16K later.
In hindsight, could I have gotten a better computer for the same or less money? I'm not sure...I didn't bother to check prices. At the time, I was fixated on the TRS-80 line, since it was the one computer I had the most experience with. Not only did I have a couple of family friends who had a Model I that I'd cut my programming teeth on, the Radio Shack was the only store in biking distance where I could play with a computer. I'm sure in my mind at the time, it was really the only option.
Looking at those prices for the CoCo, seems like I probably could've gotten the 32K version with Extended BASIC, along with a color monitor, for around what I'd paid total for the Model III ($1K, plus the $60 for the cassette deck). But considering the release dates, I guess the Model III had come out just a hair earlier than the CoCo and the VIC-20, and I was probably champing at the bit so even if I'd known those were coming out (which I probably didn't), I would've still been impatient enough to go for the Model III anyway.
We continue to see computer hardware capability improve as prices drop, but nothing so dramatic as in those early days! I'm impressed that a catalog from a few years later, well after the CoCo came out, Radio Shack was still selling the Model III for the same price I'd had to pay when it first came out. I guess that might have had something to do with their general failure to retain share in the home computing market.
Wow, CoCo 1, the computer I learned how to program on. Good times, good times! Yea those prices were unreal, but all that tech in 1983.
Yes, ANOTHER FG T-shirt sighting...thank you again, Adrian! I shall always thank you every time I see it in a video... OH, and btw, this video is of special interest to me, because I have a story to tell you about a CoCo1 in December of 1982, and a picture to show you...hopefully I can tell that story when we see each other at the next VCF...can't wait!!!
One ought to keep in mind, that previous computers were the size of a big room!
Being a big fan of the Shack and CoCo. My first used computer I found at a thrift store was a coco 1. Later I worked for a used Trs-80 Model 1. The computers in the 80's was an investment. You would get 10 years or more out of those systems. Not only was Radio Shack part of the 3 trinity of computers. You need to compare the TRS-80 Model II again mini computers that supported Multiple users for pricing. Also if you take in the fact how much 4 IBM pc's with hard drives would cost. Now it becomes more friendly of a price.
1983 was my favorite year! loved radio shack!! those are monstrous prices though!😮
I learned to program from the CoCo. Not the actual computer, I couldn't afford that, but I had the basic programming book....that I memorized. I've never ever played with one.
In 1990 I bought a 486-33 tower built by a co-worker from parts he ordered out of Computer Shopper. I wanted to buy a modem card, and I figured Radio Shack sold computers, they'd have modern parts. The local "shack" had older TRS-80 stock in the back, and nothing modern or current. I ended driving another 45 minutes to a mall that had an Electronics Boutique to buy a 2400 baud modem.
I remember reading in the store manual when I was manager about the procedure when you had a sale totally more than 10,000 dollars.
I've got a later 300 baud radio shack modem box with the original price sticker on it. $199.95.
Remember in school first half of the eighties, they had ABC80 with cassette players and what looked like home built cassette port network. A box with a few switches. Local or remote cassette, send or receive program. In remote mode, only one computer switched to send and the ones receiving obviously to receive. Then receiver type load and sender save.
Transfers was easily interrupted if someone switched to remote while transmission was active.
When teacher was distributing a program it had to be first loaded from cassette or floppy and then saved to the network.
The TRS-80 CoCo is an excellent candidate for painting since there's very little to strip the original paint, then little effort to repaint. It's good to find thin coat/fast drying paint and use seven coats, then use a clear coat with three coats.
Back in the 80's I had a CoCo 3 with an X10 interface for controlling lights and outlets.
With those computers (and prices!) Radio Shack was positioning themselves as the local place that small businesses could go for professional computing support. I recall seeing these and similar machines in offices of manufactures, accountants, lawyers, schools, doctors and dentists, etc. RS had a big initial advantage due to all those small local stores. Of course, they lost that advantage as IBM and clones figured out their distribution. Oh, and Lotus 1-2-3. :)
Tim's letter is written in the same font used by Monkey Island, isn't it?
I’d love to see the coco in blue. Black seems kind of boring for a “color compute” :-) Might as well have some fun with it!
The multiuser system we used was a Digital Group computer using Oasis multiuser software that supported 8 terminals. I personally had a Televideo terminal and a dot matrix printer at my desk. The computer had a 40 GB hard drive to support the 8 terminals [5 GB per terminal if all used.
40gb? Surely not
Yeah, how did they store their 4K movies? He obviously meant TB 😀
@@sn1000k oops 40 MB
@@crabdonkey6381 didn't mean to be critical just noting how hard it is to wrap our minds around the limitations back then
The TRS-80 add-on external drive came with a cabinet with built-in power supply - so worth a little more than a bare drive.
WOW!! I graduated high school in 1983.
Judging from the comments here, those network products were popular with schools. My high school had a bunch of model I's and the instructor a model III. I used to go in during breaks and play Star Trek. I learned that I could hit the break key and GOTO certain line numbers to cheat. It was my first experience with BASIC and it wasn't long until I was begging my parents for a computer. I eventually got the Atari 400.
Imagine buying a $15,000 computer today, that is insane. The 80's was wild time, glad I got to live through it but I was just a little kid so I didn't know the price of stuff back then. Absolutely bonkers
People do, in server farms.
Schools in the 80s and 90s had a LOT of Radio Shack machines.
The "network" was a serial port device and the serial port was polled across the network to get a particular job done piece-by-piece. Early networking.
I recently was given a bunch of vintage computers including me a really nice TRS-80 that appears to be an almost perfect condition along with some commodore disc drives and a printer. I also ended up with an old terminal computer as well. It's basically you're not going to be able to do anything unless I have the mainframe to hook it up to. I also got some IBM XT models along with some software. I also recently picked up a commodore vic-20 from eBay which needs a power supply a number 9 key and spring and also AV cables to hook it up to a TV or monitor.
This is some great context as to why everyone was going crazy over the Coleco Adam at the time. You got everything in one system for cheap and a printer. Also lots of small businesses bought the TANDY business machines, IBM computers were even more expensive.
I worked at a Radio Shack Computer Center back in the 80's, and I don't recall anyone ever showing any interest in the Model 16. They would just walk right by it and head straight for the Model 3.
Back in the day... I purchased a 4K CoCo. It lasted at 4K until the drive home, where withthe addtion of 16 16k dynamic rams and a bit of solder, it bounced up to 32k. With some other mods (jumper cuts, and a bit more), I later upgraded it to a 64k unit. The 64k unit would support OS-9 which could handle multiple users. A pretty good 8-bit machine, using a 6809, probably the BEST 8 bit chip, but a bit late to overcome the Z80 juggernaught. Oh, well.
It's always cool to see the ridiculous prices of computers back in the day. Adjusting for inflation, it's an insane amount of money for something that has very limited functionality.
Back then, in those times, early eighties, prices were extremely high. I remember I had to pay 1200 Guilders for one Micro Floppy Drive with interface. It was only single sided, 360kB. One microdiskette costed 12 Guilders and nobody else had the microdiskettes, everybody used 5 1/4 " minidiskettes. It was quick, it was reliable and compared with cassettes it saved a lot of time.
Computers costed a fortune! By the way, one US Dollar costed back then something like ƒ 3,60 (Dutch Guilders). The exchange rate changed a bit the last 40 years.
The computer lab in my Jr High school had VIC-20s with A/B/C/D mechanical selector switches for printers and disk drives. They had one disk drive and printer shared with four computers. You had to manually turn the dial switch when you wanted to use the drive or printer. With their C64s they eventually got more drives, but I imagine this scenario is similar to what the radio shack "network" was doing. I even saw a dial on one of those units in the catalog.